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More on the Renaissance





 Last week I offered a post that was a simple timeline of some of the events associated with the Renaissance, that "rebirth" of classical culture beginning in northern Italy that soon spread both west and north. I will expand a bit on the subject here.

As a matter of periodization:  the term "Renaissance" is conventionally associated with the second half of the fifteenth and the whole of the sixteenth century. I think it's fair to stretch into the seventeenth just a bit to take in Cervantes' great novel, as I did in the timeline. The term first appears in the middle of the 16th century, in the Italian form "renascita" (rebirth) in a book by Giogio Vasari, LIVES OF THE ARTISTS. "Renaissance" is a Francophone reworking of Vasari's term, coming much later.

The period known as the Enlightenment, which saw itself as a successor to the Renaissance, may be said to have begun about 30 years after the publication of DON QUIXOTE, with the publication of a very different book, Descartes' MEDITATIONS. 

But let's return to the Renaissance. As some of you may have noticed, the first half of my timeline, involving the second half of the 15th century, consisted largely of political events. The fall of Constantinople, the rise and fall of Savonarola, the rise of the Tudors in England. Cultural events take up the second half, stretching out through the 16th century.  They include two literary works (one philosophy one prose fiction), the rise of a new musical instrument, the emergence of opera, a striking painting and a renowned sculptural achievement. 

I think of the relationship between the former group of events and the latter as cause and effect. The politics made the cultural flourishing possible. For example: the victories of the Ottomans against the Byzantines in Europe's southeast sent some Hellenic scholars in search of new homes. Some of these found those new homes in Italy, and that spurred to rebirth of classical lore, a great cultural ferment. 

The rise and fall of Savonarola indicate the sharp divisions that this created within the Italian city-states, notably Florence.  Those divisions, in turn, helped inspire Machiavelli, whose work The Prince is a seminal piece of political philosophy, and a step toward the creation of a more empirical political science.

The Medici came out the victors in Florence, and they proved epically good at the patronage of the arts. 

The Tudors in England represented an early Brexit movement, a deliberate effort at cutting ties with continental institutions, the Church chief among them. It is tempting, for the purposes of a good story, to attribute the cutting of the ties to Rome to Henry VIII's dissatisfaction with his first wife. But matters are a good deal more complicated than that, and that guy's father, Henry VII, already manifested impatience with Rome, an impatience naturally reflected in the life of his son.   


 


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